The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to multicasting in a network of information handling systems.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems such as, for example, switch devices, are often utilized in datacenter networks to provide for the transfer of information. In some situations, information may be transferred within datacenter networks via switch devices using group communication methods that are referred to as multicasting. Information that is multicast may be created by a source device and transmitted to multiple receiver devices, and many conventional datacenter networks rely on Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) techniques in order to enable such multicasting. As would be understood by one of skill in the art in possession of the present disclosure, PIM is a family of multicast routing protocols for Internet Protocol (IP) networks that does not include its own topology discovery mechanism, but instead uses routing information supplied by other routing protocols (PIM is not dependent on a specific unicast routing protocol, and can make use of any unicast routing protocol in use by the network.) Furthermore, PIM does not build its own routing tables, and instead may use the unicast routing table for reverse path forwarding. However, the implementation of PIM to provide for multicasting in datacenter networks introduces a number of issues related to the complexity of PIM, which requires the creation of a multicast state in each of the switch devices/router devices that handle multicast data communications between the source device and the receiver devices. This complexity prevents multicasting functionality from being implemented in many datacenter networks that would otherwise benefit from it.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved multicasting system.